


Moratorium

by galpalaven



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: ALSO EDI and the geth are FINE becAUSE i said so also ghost boy is a liar, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Shepard Cousins, Shepard Survives, UPDATED WITH TWO NEW TALI SCENES EYY, there's two shepards basically, this is canon now i've decided, this isn't a poly fic i am sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-14
Updated: 2017-06-14
Packaged: 2018-11-13 21:11:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11193513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galpalaven/pseuds/galpalaven
Summary: The war is over, the Reapers are gone—and so is the Normandy.Now we wait.





	Moratorium

**Author's Note:**

> *looks up the word wait in the thesaurus so my title sounds cool*

Sun Shepard gets onto the Crucible in mostly one piece—Kira Shepard even more so.

The body Kira Shepard brings back to the Alliance (bleeding, limping, unsteady as she is, she doesn’t jostle the body, grip steady and firm, jaw set), charred and missing a leg, does not look like the same person. 

Hackett doesn’t believe she’s alive at first, thinks the Lieutenant-Commander has only brought the body back so that she’s not lost to space a second time, but then the body gasps and Commander Shepard’s hands fly out, grasping at anything, and her cousin is right there, squeezing her hands gently and murmuring quiet words that the Admiral can’t hear. Commander Shepard visibly relaxes, and he hears half a sob escape her throat as the medics set about trying to stop her bleeding.

He doesn’t know where the Normandy is, doesn’t know what’s happening beyond the fact that the Reapers have stopped, somehow, miraculously, thanks to the two women in front of him. The Lieutenant-Commander looks up at him tiredly when they set Shepard on a drip, morphine easing her pain and sending her to sleep within minutes. They’re still in a hallway—all other rooms are full. The medics have yet to determine what kind of surgery she needs.

“What happened up there, Shepard?” he asks, and the question feels weird on his tongue. Shepard is lying unconscious and in pieces on a cot—Shepard is smiling at him weakly, armor burnt and broken as her eyes.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

He nods. She’s probably right. The doctors bark something at each other, and Lieutenant-Commander Shepard steps dazedly aside as they rush the Commander away down the hall, disappearing through a set of double doors that she doesn’t have the energy to even consider following them through.

She sighs slowly, leaning back against the wall, still bloody and covered with soot, but mostly fine. She smiles dryly as she says, “I used to be jealous.”

Hackett looks at her, but she’s still looking at the double doors.

“Everyone always wanted _Shepard_. Shepard this, Shepard that—even my mom was having issues for a while. I thought—I thought I’d be even more jealous when Sun asked me to join her on the Normandy.” Her eyes slip closed, she tips her head back against the wall. 

“I’m not jealous anymore.”

“You’re a good soldier,” Hackett says, feeling like he needs to say something. “You and your mother.”

Shepard smiles, but doesn’t open her eyes. “It’s alright, sir. I know my place.”

“...your place?”

She rolls her head against the plaster to look at him, exhausted but there’s a dark humor swimming in her eyes. “I was the universe’s back-up plan. Sun is the hero, and my job was to be the sidekick that made sure our _There and Back Again_ had a _Back Again_ at all.”

Roughly, she drags a hand down her face, shutting her eyes one last time. “Did I _do_ my job?” She lets out a huff of air that might have been a laugh, any other day. “I can only hope.”

“Now we wait,” murmurs Hackett, straightening his jacket. He’s a bit at a loss—the war is over and he’s sure he has a lot to do, but the world feels off. Just beyond the walls of the hospital, there are the sounds of sirens and helicopters, but no blaring horns, no screaming. There is only sobbing intermixed oddly with the sound of laughter—a cacophony of sound he’s only heard once before, when the armistice was signed that ended the First Contact War. 

It’s a bittersweet sound that puts a knot in his throat.

“Now we wait,” Shepard repeats, and goes still. 

Now they wait.

 

* * *

 

Garrus doesn’t speak to anyone much anymore. Not after one of the crew found those nameplates while looking for extra rations. He’d known there was a possibility his girl hadn’t made it, but none of them knew for certain yet, and that was a fact. Seeing the plaque with “CDR SUN SHEPARD” written across it in bold letters, like it was carved into a tombstone, had been a bit too much.

And so he sits in the battery, and he waits.

Sometimes Liara tries to talk to him, when she brings him his daily meal—he notices how it gets smaller with each passing day, as they try to make what they have stretch between him and Tali. She tries to prod him about Shepard, about what he’ll do when they get off this planet and Shepard isn’t waiting for him like he hopes. The first time she asks, he snaps at her.

“Shepard’s not dead,” he practically snarls, and for a second, he sees fear flicker across the asari’s face. That deflates him a little, and he slouches, trying to make himself smaller, less threatening. “She’s not.”

“You don’t know that,” Liara tries again.

“And you don’t know she’s dead. Drop it.”

And she does, miraculously, only to ask him again a few days later. It becomes a pattern, one that gets harder to ignore the hungrier and weaker he gets. Eventually, he stops talking all together. He can barely walk across the mess hall most days, and sometimes he debates how bad dying of an allergic reaction would hurt when he catches sight of Vega or Cortez eating something in the kitchenette.

When Tali comes by, clutching a familiar piece of metal, he recoils so badly he nearly backs himself into a corner. He doesn’t want to look at that, doesn’t want to face it, but she stops in the doorway and says quietly, “It’s not hers.”

He blinks, uncomprehending, until she turns the plaque towards him and it reads: LCDR KIRA SHEPARD.

Oh.

Tali hugs it to her chest, and Garrus tries not to notice how loosely her suit has begun to fit. While he’s been struggling with his own hunger pangs, he almost forgot that so was she. Exhausted suddenly, he moves to sit on his— _nest_ he’s built on the floor of the battery, with the blankets and pillows from the captain’s cabin because he misses Sun but he couldn’t move into her room like this. Never like this.

Tali hesitates briefly, and then joins him, curling into a ball against one of the big, fluffy pillows. He watches her out of the corner of his eye, running her fingers over the letters on the plaque over and over again, like she’s trying to memorize the way they feel.

“You think they made it, too, right?” 

He sighs, tired to his very soul. “I asked EDI once about their vitals, if she’d—been able to feel them.”

“And?”

Garrus shakes his head. “She said their—their armor was too broken. Couldn’t get a read and now we’re—“

“—Out of range,” Tali finishes for him. 

He hums, too tired to say anything else. He can’t remember how to make conversation through the cloud of hunger in his head. He hasn’t been so hungry since—well, since he was kid.

“They were both biotics,” Tali says after several minutes. He opens his eyes to look at her, can’t remember when he’d closed them, and she continues, “If one of them…if they could get a barrier up, that would have protected them from the blast that we saw. They could have…that could have saved them, couldn’t it?”

She looks at him then and, even through the mask, he can see how desperately she wants to believe her theory. And, deep down, he wants to believe that too. “Yeah.” His voice is hoarse. “It could.”

The tiny flame of hope still burning in his chest flares a little at the thought.

_It could_.

 

* * *

 

Tali can’t sleep.

It’s not that the Normandy is too quiet anymore—Kira had helped her take care of that problem when she’d first set foot on the Normandy. Told her to download a white noise simulator into her helmet, that it’d help because it helped Kira when she first started serving on stealth ships. “ _I grew up on rickety space stations, too,_ ” she’d said. “ _I know it’s scary, not being able to hear something running at night, while simultaneously being able to hear every little thing that moves in the ship.”_ And it had helped, a lot, more than anything else Tali had tried way back when on the SR-1.

It could be the hunger, she thinks dizzily as she stumbles down the hallway. She’s absolutely certain her portions are smaller than Garrus’s at this point, given that he’s much larger and uses more energy than she ever could probably just getting up in the morning. Turians are carnivores—they need more food than the bland paste they have left to share.

Her eyes catch on the half opened box of nameplates lying in a corner, shoved aside because no one dared look at it after the first time they found it. Garrus had recoiled so terribly from Sun’s plaque, stumbling back into the wall and shaking his head as he shoved past everyone to go hide away again, and Tali understands, but…but he has so _much_ of Sun left here on the ship with him. Her blankets and pillows and dog tags and—and _everything_ in the Captain’s Cabin. At least he’s got things to remind him of her life, and of the possibility that she’s _still_ alive, waiting for all of her things to come home. Waiting for _him_ to come home.

Tali only has this. 

This little piece of thin metal with LCDR KIRA SHEPARD carved into it, final and depressing, but…it’s all she has. She carries it around the same way she’d carried around her favorite doll as a child on the Flotilla—the one her mother had made herself. It is physical proof that Kira _was_ alive—that Kira existed and that what they had could have been real. Could still be real.

She tries to keep her spirits up, tries to not stay in bed all day. It’s hard, trying to help the crew, but it helps keep her mind off things. Sometimes she ventures down into Engineering, hoping to find something, _anything_ different, that she maybe missed the first few dozen times. Something that could bring her home, could bring them all home.

Something that could bring her back to Kira.

But time goes on, and she gets hungrier and hungrier with each passing day, until all she can do is lie in her bunk and hold Kira’s nameplate to her chest and hope that she’s alright. That she’s out there, somewhere, waiting for her to come home just like she’s waiting to come back to her. 

Tali curls around the plaque with her love’s name on it, turns on her white noise program as loud as she can take it, and waits for sleep to take her.

 

* * *

 

Kira hates uncertainty, more than she’s ever hated anything in her life.

Between her cousin lying on a hospital bed in a medically induced coma (she’s so pale and still, sometimes the only thing that keeps Kira from pure panic is the steady beeping of the heart monitor) and the fact that she still has no idea where her girlfriend is, she’s going a little bit mad. 

Her mother, she’d found within a day of the end of the war, and they’d just held each other for an hour. Rear Admiral Hannah Shepard had survived the entire battle with barely a scratch to show for it, while her daughter was a little more worse for wear, but at least she didn’t look like her niece.

It’s been two weeks when her mother finally asks what’s bothering her. “Sometimes you look out the window with this look in your eye, like you’re expecting something. Is it—Is it the Normandy?”

Kira hesitates briefly, realizing her mother has no idea about her and Tali, has no idea her daughter isn’t even straight, before she nods once. Sighing, she rubs at her face and says, “Sun’s boyfriend will starve, if they don’t find them soon.”

“…Are you really so worried about your cousin’s boyfriend? Or is there someone else aboard that you’re worried about?”

Ah. Leave it to Mom to see right through her.

Kira doesn’t look at her mother—doesn’t want to see her reaction—as she says, “My girlfriend was on the Normandy, too. They had enough dextro rations for a while, and rationing them more strictly could last them a bit longer, but…by next week, they’ll have used up everything, unless they’ve started skipping meals. Which they probably have, but I still…”

“You still worry,” her mother finishes for her.

Kira’s eyes start to burn and there’s a lump in her throat when she nods, and then her mother is pulling her close, curling around her like she’s trying to shield her from the world, and all Kira can do is sob and wait.

 

* * *

 

You’re not supposed to really dream under heavy anesthesia.

Sun’s mind apparently didn’t get the memo.

Sometimes, her dreams are just images, sometimes just voices (she suspects those were probably doctors or nurses, speaking to her while she lay unconscious in a hospital bed). Sometimes she’s reliving the attack on Mindoir—can still taste the blood in her mouth like salty iron. Sometimes she’s straddling Garrus’s lap, mouth on his neck, listening to the quiet thrumming of his subvocals as she digs her fingers into the sensitive skin on his waist. Sometimes she’s somewhere she can’t remember having ever been—a desert on a clear night, with the Milky Way stretching across the sky.

She’s dreaming of Garrus when she finally wakes, for the first time since the Crucible.

It’s a slow coming to—first sound returns, muffled but there, then the realization that there are lights on above her. There’s a hand on her arm, warm and calloused, but with five fingers instead of three, which her mouth apparently doesn’t register because the first word out of her mouth is still, “Garrus?”

“Kira,” says a familiar voice, as she finally blinks away the last of the blur from her vision. Or, well, most of it, as she turns to look at her cousin.Kira’s smiling, but it’s sad and empty, and Sun’s heart sinks. Something is wrong.

“What is it?”

Kira shakes her head, looking away towards the door as it opens and a nurse comes in, followed closely by someone Sun recognizes—her aunt? How long has it been since she’s seen _her_? Aunt Hannah smiles warmly when she reaches the foot of the bed, and that’s when Shepard notices it.

She’s missing her left leg from the knee down.

She can’t stop staring at the flatness of the blanket, even as her family starts talking to her, and she thinks the nurse says something, but there’s a rushing in her ears and she can’t listen. She wiggles the toes of her right foot, swears she can feel her left foot doing the same even though there is _nothing there_. She takes catalogue of her other body parts, lifting both hands and counting ten fingers. Her face feels fine, save for some soreness on the left, and she wonders how bad she looks. She must have been burned. She must have—

“Sun, can you hear me?”

Feeling unhinged, Shepard just turns her head to look at her cousin, who gives another tentative smile. Eyes watering, genuinely distressed now, Sun’s voice is hoarse as she asks, “Kira, where’s Garrus?”

Her cousin’s face falls, and so does Shepard’s heart. “The Normandy’s currently…missing in action. I don’t know where Garrus is. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Sun breathes, because if Garrus is missing, so is Tali. So is everyone.

Kira shakes her head with a sigh. “All we can do is wait.”

 

* * *

 

Garrus can barely move when a search team finally arrives. 

It takes four very large humans to help him off the floor of the battery and into the med bay, where it takes them 4 tries before Dr. Chakwas steps in to find a vein large enough to start an IV. They’ve brought enough rations with them to last at least two months, with both Tali and him on board, but they assure him that they won’t be needing all of it. The repairs are already underway, and all the Normandy really needs is some fuel before it’s good to go, ready to fly back to Earth where it belongs.

He sleeps a lot, waiting for them to finally get off this godforsaken rock. Tali’s also confined to the med bay, he discovers once when Chakwas rouses him to try and get him to eat something. They have to take Tali’s helmet off to help her eat, with the medics already ready to treat the fever that would come with breathing in whatever germs were lurking in the room. 

“It’s mostly sterile in here,” she tells him once, taking another bite of mush, “so the fever isn’t bad, but you’ve been asleep for most of it.”

He hums, forces himself to swallow down the last of his own dinner. “How much longer until we leave?”

She blinks at him, and he’s still trying to adjust to being able to see her face when she smiles suddenly and laughs. “We’ve already left. We’re set to reach Earth in about three days.” 

_Three days_. Three days until all of this is over. Three days until he can get a real meal, until he can call Solana and his dad.

Three days until he finds out if Shepard is waiting for him just like he’s been waiting for her. 

It’s almost too soon, but it’s also almost too long to wait. He wants to know now, but part of him is also terrified to know. After Vega had dug up that old Shepard VI from the back of Sun’s closet a week ago, he’s not sure how well he’ll be able to bear it if she hasn’t survived. If she’s not waiting for him on Earth…

Garrus settles further into his cot, and leaves off thinking for a while. Worrying will get him nowhere, anyway.

 

* * *

 

Tali worries about Garrus, after the search team starts to work on getting them airborne again. He sleeps so much, so weakened from his hunger that he can’t even manage to keep his eyes open. When he does wake, he's barely there, only managing quiet, small conversations that last less than a minute or two. She’s faring a bit better, but then maybe it’s because she’d eaten every meal Liara brought her. There were a few times, Liara had confided, that Garrus hadn’t touched the mush, just left it sitting outside his locked door for the day.

“ _I’m not hungry_ ,” he apparently told her. “ _I’ll be fine_.”

But he isn’t _fine_ , not from the way Doctor Chakwas and the other medics worry over him. Sure, he’s getting better at being able to pick up his food and eat, but they still have to give him most of his meals intravenously, because he isn’t awake or coherent long enough for him to eat enough to make a difference. The doctor says he’s getting better, but how much of that is just for her sake? What if he was already too far gone, and this charade is just so she doesn’t freak out? How terrible would it be for them to get back to Earth only to have to tell Shepard that Garrus starved to death before he came home to her?

The thought leaves a bad taste in her mouth, and ignoring the nausea her fever is still causing as best she can, she sinks a little further into the pillows, takes another bit of mush, and tries not to think for a while.

 

* * *

 

“The Normandy is set to arrive today,” the nurse with a surprisingly familiar voice says casually, through the mask covering her mouth. Shepard frowns at her, and she pulls her mask down to wink and grin. Kira drags in a wheelchair behind her, shutting the door quickly just in case someone sees through her disguise. “Up for a little jail break?”

Sun’s already pushing herself up before she’s finished the question, ready to crawl across the room if she has to because it’s _the Normandy_ and _Garrus_ and she can’t get out of this damn bed fast enough. Kira’s at her side an instant later, hooking her arm under her one leg and carrying Sun bridal style over to the chair, carefully helping her balance on one foot before she falls heavily into the seat. Kira hands her a tiny container that reads ‘face paint’ across it as she starts to back up towards the door.

She hands her a pocket-sized mirror as well and says, “Thought you might want to surprise your husband—yeah, I know about that, by the way—just that much more when he finally sees you.”

Sun smiles, so widely that her bandages on her cheek pull, and she shakes her head as she carefully sets to work, making sure to avoid getting paint beneath the bandage. No need to get an infection on an already nasty wound.

No one tries to stop them on their way to the docking bay, and Shepard thanks whatever deities may be listening that she’ll get this moment after waiting for what felt like ages.

 

* * *

 

Most of the crew gathers around the cockpit to watch Earth come into view. Garrus leans on the wall, still weak but feeling better, and before he knows it, there’s a familiar, raspy voice over the intercom that he recognizes as Admiral Hackett.

“Welcome home, Normandy.”

Joker grins, and murmur of delighted, quiet laughter spreads across the room. “Good to be back, sir.”

And that’s that. There’s not much more radio chatter after that, other than the docking instructions, and suddenly he’s nervous all over again. He doesn’t know what he’ll find, once they dock. He doesn’t know if she’s still alive, if she made it out. Tali is standing close by his side, and he can feel the same tension radiating from her. He’s never been so nervous in all his life, he thinks, not once, not even his first day at boot camp. Not even facing Saren, or the Reaper on Tuchanka, or the Reaper on Rannoch, or _anything_.

He still needs help walking down the docking tube when they finally come to a stop, Vega letting him lean on his shoulder as they slowly make their way to solid ground. 

The docking bay waiting area is more crowded than he’d expected, a round of applause rising as the first of the crew step into the room. Garrus tries not to look too eager as he scans the faces in the crowd but—maybe she—

His eyes catch on familiar blue markings, and his heart skips a beat. Or five.

She’s in a wheelchair, he notices in the back of his mind, but the rest of him is too focused on the fact that she’s _here_ and she’s _smiling_ and before Garrus can stop to think about it, he’s broken into a dead sprint through the crowd, shoving people out of the way when they can’t dodge him in time. He’s never run so fast in his life.

He collapses when he reaches her, falling heavily to his knees, face suspiciously wet as he throws himself bodily into her open arms. He buries his nose in the crook of her neck, breathes in her warmth, arms tight around her waist and he can feel the vibrations of her delighted laughter in his gut. Alive. She’s alive. Alive, alive, _alive_.

He doesn’t realize he’s sobbing—openly, hard and a little loud in front of a crowd of onlookers—until he registers that she’s shushing him.

“Shh, Garrus, _Garrus_. It’s okay, I’m here, I’m here, I’m okay, you’re okay. We’re okay, sweetie, just breathe.”

Garrus pulls back to look at her, breath hitching, and she wipes gently at the tears on his faceplates, leaning in and pressing a firm kiss to the center of his forehead. He leans into her further, unable to get close enough, tilting his chin so her lips fall on his mouth instead of his forehead, and the final piece of his sanity clicks back into place.

When she pulls back to smile at him again, he laughs, voice thick, and rasps, “Hey, Sunshine.”

Shepard presses her forehead to his. “Hey, Big Guy. Welcome home.”

 

* * *

 

Tali doesn’t know where Garrus is going, at first, when he breaks away to sprint into the crowd. There’s a brief, terrifying moment that she thinks maybe he’s lost his mind a little bit, but then he falls to his knees and Tali sees who he was running to meet—who he’s always been running to meet, she thinks.

Sun wraps her arms around him and holds him as he cries, and Liara’s hand holding Tali up falters a little at the sight of their Commander, alive and well, if maybe not in one piece.

And then Tali looks at the nurse behind Shepard’s wheelchair, and her blood runs cold.

_“Keelah_ ,” falls from her lips before she can stop it—a gasp and nothing more, and before she can think to stop herself, she’s pushing Liara away, and making her own way through the crowd. 

Kira’s waiting for her with open arms, and Tali can’t help herself as she tears her mask off in the middle of the docking bay, letting it clatter to the floor behind her as she throws herself into her girlfriend’s arms, kissing her soundly. She laughs into her mouth as Kira tightens her grip on her waist and lifts, spinning them on the spot. They’re both a little weepy, but neither of them can seem to stop smiling, not even when the rest of the crew starts to sidle up to greet their Shepards as well.

Kira doesn’t let Tali move away, even when Liara moves in for a hug, one arm tight around her waist like she’s afraid she’ll disappear again. Tali doesn’t mind one bit, but their reunion can’t last forever.

“Both of you need to receive immediate medical attention,” comes Dr. Chakwas’s stern voice. “We did what we could on the way here, but you’re both still severely malnourished. Come on, Garrus, off the floor. Shepard will still be here when you’re no longer lacking all proper nutrients.”

She ushers Tali away with Garrus, who won’t quite look anyone in the eye as he scrubs self-consciously at the tears left on his face. Someone picks up Tali’s mask and hands it to her, and she slides it back into place as she turns to take one more look at her girlfriend and Commander Shepard, surrounded now by friends and crew members. Joker is about to topple over on his crutches as he leans down to hug Sun in her wheelchair, and Tali is still smiling at the sight when she and Garrus round the corner and head down the hall.

 

* * *

 

Kira basically moves into Tali’s room, once they get her settled in. Kira’s wounds were mostly just minor burns and cuts, so she has no assigned room, has nowhere she’s supposed to be. She camps out on the little sofa by the window, and enjoys the fact that her girlfriend is alive and getting better with each passing day.

Her mother only comes to visit once, busy as she is with reparations after the war. She sits beside Kira and watches Tali sleep for a long moment before she finally says, “You really care for her, don’t you?”

Kira hugs her knees to her chest, listens to the steady beeping of the heart monitor, and nods. “I do.”

And then her mother does something she doesn’t expect—Hannah Shepard smiles. “Then that’s enough for me. I’ll have to meet her properly once she’s better and out of this hospital bed. Make sure she knows not to break your heart while I’m still breathing.”

Kira laughs, shaking her head. “She’s an Admiral, too, you know. You don’t want to start a diplomatic incident over _me_.”

Her mom just shrugs. “If she hurt you, I might just be willing to start something. You never know.”

Kira hums softly, eyes on the rise and fall of the blanket covering Tali’s chest, and sighs. “I wouldn’t worry,” she says lightly. “Tali’s the best girlfriend a girl like me could ever ask for. You’ll love her.”

“I suppose we’ll see, won’t we.”

She grins, and her mother smiles back, as Kira says, “Yeah. We’ll see.”

 

* * *

 

The doctors try very hard to keep Sun Shepard in her own bed, they really do, but there’s no helping it.

At one point, they literally ban wheelchairs from her room, then crutches when she manages to just _walk_ herself down the hall and up four floors to Garrus Vakarian’s room. Sun doesn’t fight when they come to take her away from him, blows him a kiss as they usher her back out of the room and to her own bed. 

But there’s nothing to be done, truthfully. She always finds a way—either with help or on her own. So, a week after the Normandy is returned to Earth, Sun Shepard and Garrus Vakarian are moved to a shared room.

Shepard’s healing is mostly on the up and up now—she’s not sleeping all day anymore, distracting herself with books or video games while she waits for Garrus to wake. He’s been on a steady drip since he got back, having not eaten properly in weeks, and he was asleep when they moved them to this new room. 

She isn’t paying attention when he does finally wake, groaning softly as he takes in where she’s sitting, propped up against the pillows with a laptop and a movie. 

“Sun?” he asks, and that gets her attention. 

She smiles at him when her eyes meet his, and she snaps the laptop shut to push herself up and out of the bed, carefully hopping the gap between their beds to climb in beside him. He doesn’t say anything about this, just shifts so that he’s lying more on his side, and nudges his forehead gently against hers. She reaches a hand up to touch his scarred mandible, letting it rest there when his eyes drift shut and he lets out a slow, contented sigh.

“I love you,” he tells her, so low she almost misses it.

“I love you, too,” she answers, smiling when his mandible shifts under her hand in a sleepy, crooked smile.

There is nothing else she can think to say that is worth breaking this quiet moment, so she closes her eyes, too, content and warm in this closeness. Before she realizes it, she’s fallen asleep right along with him.

When Sun wakes with an extra blanket tucked carefully around the both of them, she realizes the nurses had let her be for once. She lets herself drift back into the land of dreams with a smile on her face, and Garrus’s hand resting lightly on her waist.

**Author's Note:**

> This wasn't my canon but I've decided I like it too much so yeah.
> 
> come visit me on [ tumblr](http://galpalaven.tumblr.com) to talk about Kira and Sun and their relationships and stuff


End file.
